Good Recruitment Marketing requires lots and lots of content to keep all your recruiting channels active and engaging. The challenge is that it takes times, money and know-how to create quality recruiting content that works.
If a small budget is your issue, here are some tools that can help you build out the quality content you need without breaking the bank (they’re all free!):
Idea generating tools
Sometimes thinking of an idea is the toughest part of the content creation process. If you don’t have a huge team to brainstorm with, some of these resources can be a great starting point to spark your creativity:
- Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator thinks up blog ideas for you. All you need to do is enter a few nouns and the tool will deliver back five suggestions for blog titles. I entered “Engineer” and “Success,” and one of the options presented was “20 Myths about Engineers” which gave me the idea for an article entitled “20 Myths About Working as an Engineer at [insert company name here].” The opportunities with this tool are endless!
- Answer the Public is a magical search engine that shows you which questions are most frequently asked about a keyword you enter, which can give you some great content prompts. I entered “Sales Jobs” as a keyword, and it came back with a ton of questions that sparked ideas, like: “What are fun Sales jobs?”, “What are inside Sales jobs?”, “Are Sales jobs easy to get?”, “Which Sales jobs are the best?” — the list goes on and on!
- BuzzSumo provides intel into which topics will perform best on social. All you need to do is enter a keyword and BuzzSumo delivers a list of the content that’s worked best in that area historically. BuzzSumo also identifies influencers and authors associated with your keyword so you can extend your reach.
- Google Trends will show you how particular topics (or keywords) are trending over time. Using this tool you can also research what people are searching most frequently to be able to create Recruitment Marketing content that feels timely and that will capture more organic searches.
- Feedly lets you set up custom feeds that can track certain accounts or hashtags to keep you up to date. Here’s an example of how this tool might work to your advantage as a Recruitment Marketer. If you’re looking to attract more Information Security talent, you could follow the hashtag #informationsecurity so that you can create content that will resonate with what’s happening in the industry.
Content planning and scheduling
Staying organized and communicating about your content plans are two critical factors that spell success in Recruitment Marketing. However, using the wrong tools here can make this work a lot more time consuming, keeping you from getting to the tasks that have a bigger impact. Here are some tools that will let you retire that old Excel spreadsheet content calendar and save yourself some headaches!
- Buffer lets you plan and queue posts in advance, set a posting schedule and view performance metrics on up to three social media accounts for free. A great tool for startups and smaller orgs with only a few accounts to manage.
- Google Calendar is one of the best options for a free Editorial Calendar. Simply create a new calendar and plug in content pieces as events for days when you plan to post. You can set color labels for certain categories or authors. This way you can zoom in to a weekly or daily view or zoom out and see a month’s worth of content at a glance. Anyone with access can make changes in real-time, which saves having to worry about version control.
- Google Sheets is another great option if you don’t want to use Google Calendar, or if you want to create a secondary resource that covers more details than your Google editorial calendar. There are a ton of ways you can format Google Sheets to work as an editorial calendar for you. If you search for “google sheets editorial calendar template” some great options will come up for you to download and copy-paste into a new editorial calendar. Easy as can be!
- Trello is a visual project management tool that lets you view a ton of information at a glance. You might consider starting a board that features lists in categories like “Ideas,” “Research,” “Writing,” “Pending Approval,” and “Ready to Go.” This is a great way for remote colleagues to stay connected on the status of content and make sure that you’re meeting deadlines.
Editing and writing tools
Copy that pulls in your audience is a big plus for Recruitment Marketing. If your writing resonates, it can be the difference between a new applicant and a bounced site visitor. Here are a few tools that will help you produce your best writing:
- Google Docs has become so pervasive that the tool almost doesn’t require an introduction! You can create and access a range of document types across all of your devices for free. Google Docs is also amazing for collaboration and gathering input across the content creation life cycle.
- The Hemingway App is a copy editing tool that makes your writing clear, concise and engaging (just like Ernest’s). Simply copy in your text, and the editor will highlight sentences that are too long, complex or that have grammatical errors.
- Grammarly is another online editor that will highlight any errors or issues in your text with a simple copy-paste. You can also install the free Google Chrome extension so that Grammarly can track and improve your writing across every online activity, including when writing social media posts in platform.
- Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer will double check that your blog or video titles are optimized. The tool provides a score and offers feedback to improve your title to drive traffic, shares and search results. A nice check to run before you press the “publish” button!
Design tools
An image is the first thing that grabs someone’s attention and helps them decide whether to invest their time into reading your content. Of course, not every Recruitment Marketer has a team of professional designers on standby. So, here are some great tools that can help you create eye-catching visuals to attract your audience:
- Canva is my personal favorite on this entire list. This tool lets you quickly and easily create beautiful image designs and documents. They have countless templates and layouts that will let you create great graphics for social media, blogs, your site and much more, without any design experience.
- Design Wizard is a new tool that is similar to Canva but offers up some different templates and designs, along with the ability to access video templates to add some text and flair to your video content. Their free version also lets you resize your design and download images with a transparent background, which you can only do on Canva with a premium plan.
- Unsplash lets you access and use beautiful photos for your own designs. The quality of contributions is very high and they have a ton of people pictures that work well for Recruitment Marketing content.
- Ripl gives you the power to create animated videos and share them on social with the click of a button. Quick to use, and definitely attention grabbing!
- Powtoon is similar to Ripl except this tool is intended for longer-length videos that you’re looking to animate.
Measurement tools
Last, but not least important, are measurements tools. Since you’re going to all the effort of creating outstanding content, it’s important to share your success! These tools give the insight you need to tweak things on an ongoing basis so you can continue to get more and more effective at attracting great people to your organization. Here’s my top picks in this category:
- Google Analytics is a suite of products that provides you with insight across a number of areas. If you haven’t set up an account for your career site already, it’s a great idea to do so. It will provide you with information about who’s visiting your site, how long they’re staying for and where they’re coming from.
- SEO Tools by Moz can offer an extra layer of analysis for any web page you put in. The tool will show you how to optimize your site to drive more traffic.
- SumAll is a comprehensive free tool that gives you information into your performance across various platforms, and gives you the chance to automate some interactions (like sending out a thank you tweet to your most engaged followers from the week). It can also send all the information to you in a neat weekly digest so you know what’s working and what’s not. Definitely worth checking out!
- Cyfe is a tool that lets you build out a custom dashboard to spotlight the performance of your social media accounts across a number of areas. You can use this tool to monitor brand mentions, track follower growth, observe demographic changes over time and more, all in one beautiful easy-to-export dashboard.
- In-platform insights are also worth checking out and exporting. Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and LinkedIn Business Insights all provide per-post performance and a range of follower insights that you can export to Excel. If you set up your Instagram as a Business Account, you’ll also gain access to analytics features for this platform.
I hope the tools on this list save you time or help you create your best content ever. If you’re looking for tools to help with video content creation, take a look at the Rally blog, 19 Easy DIY Video Tools to Boost Your Recruiting Content Strategy.
